CMO Chats with Ben Preston, CMO of WeMoney

We’d love to learn a bit more about yourself and the position that you’re in right now.

My name is Ben. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for the Australian FinTech company, WeMoney, overseeing all marketing strategies, growth, and initiatives. I previously worked for an early tech company at Cover Genius, where I helped grow the company to unicorn status. Before that, I had a bit of varied experience. I had a startup of my own; I was an early employee of the fast-growing consumer brand in Australia, Koh, and I worked at American Express in the US. As for my educational background, I went to Cornell University and have an MBA from Oxford.

In terms of what we do at WeMoney, we’re the Australian leader in personal financial management. Our aim is to help all Aussies achieve their financial goals and really just have a better sense of financial wellness. We help people aggregate their financial accounts, track expenses, and see their credit scores, all for free on our app. Additionally, we have a feature that has a social community where people can share financial tips and advice.

Can you dive into a little bit more detail about your role as CMO in the company and what your main marketing focus is at the moment, and maybe sort of in the past as well, leading up to today?

Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of my experience, because I’ve worked in technology for a while and kind of startups and skeleton companies, is really colored by that. Because we’re a money and finance app, it’s kind of a fast-scaling technology space. As you would imagine, that means my primary background and my primary focus are really on digital marketing, growth, marketing, and a ton of analytics. We do a lot of work on data-driven approaches to acquiring new customers, retaining customers, and building our membership base across social and paid acquisition platforms. The main ones that you’d think about, of course, are Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snapchat. Really, my background is actually as a digital marketer, and my experience is really geared towards that domain. I also see oversee as interventions, being CMO, you know, other aspects of our marketing, such as the overall marketing, strategy, PR, brand, surveys, events, lifecycle marketing, and analytics.

Can you tell me about an innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed?

Yeah, absolutely. In 2023, before I started with WeMoney, but I think it was such an important and impactful campaign, we actually ran a financial wellness survey. We’ve been downloaded over 750k times in Australia, so we have this really big community, and we really wanted to get a sense of what they have to say about society, about the economy, and about their finances. We really had an opportunity to get a lot of good data and explore how every day Aussies really feel about the economy. It’s been a very turbulent year—a couple of years, as we all know. We had some really profound insights that were interesting from a growth and marketing perspective. But I’m also really understanding what’s going on in society here in Australia.

Some of the insights are that 40% of Australians, or 4 out of 10 Australians, are currently anxious about their financial situation. 50% of Australians are actually living paycheck-to-paycheck with little to no savings. 84% of respondents actually say that the cost of housing is unaffordable. So, virtually everybody in Australia is saying housing is unaffordable. And it’s these insights that I think they’re really good from a PR and oppressive kind of contact angle. But it gave us really deep insights into how our customers are feeling. And then, from a product perspective and a feature perspective, we can actually build things into our finance app that actually help them at a deeper level.

As you said, there has been a lot of change recently, especially over the last couple of years. And, with that, at the moment, what’s your biggest marketing challenge?

It’s a great question. As we mentioned before, the vast majority of my career has been in this technology space, the startup space, and the high growth scale of tech companies. And it’s interesting because, obviously, there’s been a big shift over the past couple of years with all this macroeconomic turbulence before 2022. I consider myself a growth marketer; my job is all about growth. Of course, you know, that didn’t mean things were easy. That doesn’t mean it was just spending money to get the result. It was still a lot of work and a lot of analytical work. But it just meant that the focus was really on the top line. It was around scale, revenue, and all about growing users—all these things.

Then, in 2022, as we all know, the world changed generally, and then there were all changes, even faster in the tech world. So we had this inflation after the pandemic, which led to higher interest rates around the world and just caused a collapse in VC funding. I think VC funding was around $680 billion in 2021. And it actually went down to about 224 billion in 2023—an absolutely massive change. The upshot is that technology is still alive and kicking; we’re still here. But the expectations from the market and the expectations from investors, which kind of filter down the expectations from your CEO or the founder you’re working with, have all changed.

So now, the big challenge is that you still need that top-line growth and that scale, but you also need to achieve it while also being profitable. So now, instead of just focusing on one thing and executing that, you’re actually doing two things at the same time, but two things that might have a little bit of an inherent tension between the two goals. There’s so much more focus these days on business fundamentals and the unit economics of products. And, for me, that’s the biggest challenge; it’s really that you need to grow sustainably and profitably.

So, I imagine in that scene, you have to get a bit more creative and, but focus at the same time.

That’s right. For me, and we can talk about this more. But the focus is that we are always making data-driven decisions; data has never become more important. It’s like you’re threading a needle. And you need to make these really, really marginal calls. And I think the focus on analytics and data is more on the kind of industry than I’ve ever seen before.

In terms of how your company stays ahead of its competitors, in terms of marketing, how are you doing that?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I’ll actually talk about WeMoney, which I joined as chief marketing officer a couple of months ago. And then I was also head of marketing for APAC at the unicorn Cover Genius. And it’s actually interesting; a lot of the core competencies are actually quite similar across both companies.

The first one is data. It’s the heart of everything we do—and all critical decisions are made based on extremely detailed data. The focus on analytics is almost impossible to emphasize. These days, if you want to achieve both growth and profitability, you need to be a master of your data.

The second thing and this is really common across both companies, is not accepting the industry standard and always finding a new way to look at a problem. And I know that’s kind of sounds cliche, but if you do things the industry norm way, you’re going to get industry norm results, and if you’re like a high-growth technology company, that’s frankly just not acceptable. And so, both companies really built a culture of actually trying to figure out new ways of doing things. One interesting way this manifests itself is by actually finding people who don’t necessarily have a particular background for a job but have them do that role so they bring different experiences into the arena. This kind of relates to my third point.

I think it’s really important for all kinds of CMOs, C-suite founders, and anyone leading a group of people to just hire the best. This is what I’ve seen for both companies. For a CMO, in particular, you’re only one person; you’re only as good as the team that surrounds you. And when I look back at my time at companies where things were really firing, it’s because we were surrounded by an amazing team.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

For me, the future of marketing is all around performance creativity. In 2023, digital ad spending was just a bit over $600 billion globally. It’s a very natural step, like it’s going to pass $1 trillion in the next couple of years, definitely by 2030. Digital really is the future of marketing. What that means is that you actually need a team of people who can both understand the data coming in through your digital ad platforms and also have the ability to translate that data into really compelling messaging and really unique content for ads that resonate with your customers. So. I think the future of marketing is people who are both quantitative and creative.

A lot of people we reach out to say data is great, but to be able to use it efficiently and, like you say, with a creative mind that maybe other people aren’t doing is what’s going to separate people.

That’s exactly right. I actually find this from my time in companies. It’s so interesting because data is such a buzzword, and everyone thinks they use data well. The hard part of data isn’t having it. The hard part is actually understanding the kind of store worry from the data and using that to guide your performance effectively.

Here’s a very hard question: What is the role of a chief marketing officer in one word, and why?

That is a really difficult question. I think I’d sum it up as lead. Your goal as a CMO is to lead. And the reason I say that is because it actually goes back to our previous question of surrounding yourself with the best talent. Your goal as a CMO is to hire the best people; it’s to mentor them; it’s to help develop them, it’s to get into the weeds where they have a really difficult problem; it’s to challenge them. It comes back to the fact that as a CMO, you’re only one person, and you need to be surrounded and you need to lead a team and surround yourself with a team because you’re only going to be as good as them. Your performance as a CMO will only be as good as the performance of the person who does PR on your team, the person who understands your brand, the person who runs your surveys and events, and the person who runs your digital marketing channels.

I totally agree, and maybe that leads nicely to the next question. Because you, you talk about that sort of mentoring and hiring. What career advice would you give to marketing leaders out there to get up to that CMO level?

I love this question. There’s one that absolutely sticks out in my mind, and that would be that I’d foster resilience. Foster resilience in yourself and in your team. And every job I’ve ever had, especially for the companies that have done really well, it’s actually not just fun and games, of course, right? It’s not all charts that are up to par; every company I’ve ever been in has had almost existential-level challenges. It’s the ability to kind of face those challenges head-on. I would almost say that you have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Develop that grit. Develop that persistence. Because here’s the thing: to me, grit and persistence aren’t natural tricks; they’re learned habits. You have to be able to take on those challenges and actually learn from repetition. How to confront a very stressful situation in a calm, thoughtful way. By the way, this is doubly true, especially nowadays, for those who work in startups or tech. You have to be comfortable in these often very uncomfortable situations.

The first one is to foster resilience, but I do want to add one other one, which is building relationships. We’re in the days of AI everything and automation everything—I do that a lot for my work. But what I actually find is that, like, there’s this funny trend, which is that the more things are automated online in your work life, and the more you see AI, it’s the people who have really deep relationships that are actually doing really well. I think of hiring as a really good example; it is so easy to create a resume and apply to 1000 jobs. I actually see the people who are getting hired for different jobs, and they’re the ones who have relationships with people at the company currently. So I really think that as we go into the world of AI and automation, relationships are going to matter more than ever.